If it wasn’t already basic Marketing 101, I could swear that Barclays had a strategy document hidden away somewhere with a title like ‘Pinkwashing: It’s Piss Easy’. I’ve written a few times previously about their involvement with Stonewall, who seem happy to get into bed with any company which bats an eyelash at them even if its commitment is somewhat half-hearted. This week saw Barclays’ use of the LGBT community to bolster its image reach new depths with the launch of an advertising campaign built around its sponsorship of London Pride. Its Spectrum group, dedicated to ‘diversity and inclusion’, has been encouraging the use of #FreedomTo on social media and merrily tweeting images like these:

I find it interesting that any explicit reference to or portrayal of LGBT people on these adverts is muted – in fact, it would be easy enough to entirely miss that this was an LGBT-focused campaign rather than some generic, asinine message. This is particularly noticeable in their risible ‘GAYTMs’:

What are these?! I fail to see how sub-Hallmark sentiments written on some terrible patterns which have escaped from adorning bus seats suggest ‘LGBT Pride’ in any way whatsoever. And yet they’ve inspired adoring responses:

It doesn’t stop there. If looking at insipid messages, terrible graphic design and portrayals of LGBT life which wouldn’t scare the most virulent homophobe don’t make you proud enough you can actually adorn yourself in some marketing:

As space hijackers tweeted, what was once a riot is now a “contactless adventure”! Branding yourself in this way even seems to get you access to a ‘private’ area of Pride in Golden Square, something listed on both the Pride and‘bpay’ sites but with no further information provided. Possibly because an area reserved for people who prostrate themselves before a corporate sponsor isn’t exactly in keeping with the radical origins of Pride.

Not that Barclays, or Pride, would know it. The exchange beneath this tweet is illuminating. When someone complains that this branding is ‘not in the spirit of Pride’, Barclays responds that the event couldn’t even happen ‘without the financial support of Corporates”. The Pride account then chips in, saying that “only corporate sponsorship” allows the event to have “a unique meaning for everyone who comes along”. To complete the unholy triumvirate, an employee of Stonewall pops up to insist that “corporate support is vital to pride” and enquire as to how else it would be funded. The message is clear – the ungrateful oink who deigned to question the corporate branding of Pride should shut up. Barclays are doing the queers a favour! The fact that Pride events happened without such sponsorship for many years, and continue to happen today, is presumably irrelevant. The notion that Pride could have an ethical sponsorship policy is ludicrous because…reasons. Even more absurd is the idea that Pride probably doesn’t really need a series of stages (costing in excess of £200,000) featuring a bunch of terrible acts no-one has heard of. Lest we forget, Pride is held around the anniversary of the Stonewall riots (bang on the day this year, in fact). It rather sticks in the craw that this event, commonly held to be the beginning of the modern radical LGBT liberation movement, is now an excuse for a company as mired in scandal, sleaze and immorality as Barclays to apply an easy gloss to its image. Any doubt that this is the main purpose behind their sponsorship should be put to rest by this odious interview in the Evening Standard, which glosses over “slashing jobs or preserving sky-high pay” to provide a Pride-based platform for the Barclays CEO to trumpet the company’s “ethical dimension” and its ‘diversity’. That’s quite handy just weeks after you’ve announced the sacking of almost 20,000 people. It’s handy when your bank has been the single largest supporter of the arms trade in the UK sector, profiting from the support and sale of arms to not-exactly-LGBT-friendly regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Uganda and supporting the manufacture of drones. It helps in avoiding unfortunate questions about your bank’s seemingly endless scandals, from Libor to money-laundering/sanction-busting to unwarranted bonuses to helping cause and profiting from the hunger and malnutrition of millions. Barclays is no friend of the LGBT community. It’s no friend of most of humanity. We owe it no gratitude and we certainly owe no loyalty to Pride in assisting with its pinkwashing. Instead, let’s in a small but meaningful way show them that we value the roots of Pride. We value liberation for everyone and will not allow our dignity to be commodified in the name of an abhorrent bank. The #freedomto say ‘not in our name’ is where real pride lies.